agreed with Mr. Page. Anne has given the slip to both father and mother, having promised her father to wear white for Slender and her mother to dress in green for the doctor. But she dressed boy substitutes in white and green, and fooled them all. KING HENRY V. is the last of Shakespeare's ten great war dramas. It was first printed in 1600, the materials being derived from Holinshed and the old play on the same subject. Henry IV. is dead, and bluff King Hal is showing himself to be every inch a king. His claim to the crown of France is solemnly sanctioned. The Dauphin has sent him his merry mock of tennis balls, and got his stern answer. The traitors -Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey-have been sent to their death. The choice youth of England (and some riff-raff, too, such as Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol) have embarked at Southampton, and the threaden sails have drawn the huge bottoms through the sea to France. The third act opens in the very heat of an attack upon the walls of the seaport of Harfleur, and King Harry is urging on his men in that impassioned speech -"Once more unto the breach, dear friends"-which thrills the heart like a slogan in battle. We also catch glimpses of the army in Picardy, and finally see it on the eve of Agincourt. The night is rainy and dark, the hostile camps are closely joined. King Henry, cheerful and strong, goes disguised through his camp, and finds that whatever the issue of the war may be, he is expected to bear all the responsibility. A private soldier-Williams-impeaches the King's good faith, and the disguised Henry accepts his glove as a gauge and challenge for the morrow. Day dawns, the fight is on, the dogged English win the day. Then, as a relief to his nerves, Henry has his bit of fun with Williams, who has sworn to box the ear of the man caught wearing the mate of his glove. The wooing by King Henry of Kate, the French King's daughter, ends the play. But all through the drama runs also a comic vein. The humorous characters are Pistol,-now married to Nell Quickly,-Bardolph, Nym, and Fluellen. Falstaff, his heart "fracted and corroborate» by the King's casting of him off, and babbling o' green fields, has "gone to Arthur's bosom.» His followers are off for the wars. At Har fleur, Bardolph, of the purple and bubukled nose, cries, "On to the breach!» very valorously, but is soon hanged for robbing a church. Le grand Capitaine Pistol so awes a poor Johnny Crapaud of a prisoner that he offers him two hundred crowns in ransom. Pistol fires off some stinging bullets of wit at the Saint Tavy's day leek in the cap of Fluellen, who presently makes him eat a leek, giving him the cudgel over the head for sauce. The blackguard hies him home to London to swear he got his scalp wound in the wars. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING was first published in 1600. The mere skeleton of the serious portions of the drama he took from Bandello, through Belleforest's translation; the comic scenes are all his own. In the portrayal of Beatrice, Benedick, and Dogberry, he lavishes all his skill. The constable Dogberry is hit off to the life, with his irresistibly funny malapropisms. He is a lovable old heart-of-gold, who is always taking off his hat to himself and his office, and absurdly pardons every crime except the calling of himself an ass. The scene is laid in Messina. Benedick is just home from the wars. He and Beatrice have had some sparring matches before, and thick and fast now fly the tart and merry witticisms between them,-she "the sauciest, most piquant madcap girl that Shakespeare ever drew," yet genuinely sympathetic; he a genial wit who tempts fate by his oaths that he will never marry. From the wars comes too Claudio, brave, but a light-weight fop, selfish, and touchy about his honor. He loves Hero, daughter of Leonato. Beatrice is the latter's niece, and in his house and orchard the action mostly takes place. The gentlemen lay a merry plot to ensnare Beatrice and Benedick. The latter is reading in the orchard, and overhears their talk about the violent love of Beatrice for him, and how (Hero has said) she would rather die than confess it. The bait is eagerly swallowed. Next Beatrice, hearing that Hero and Ursula are talking about her in the garden, runs, stooping like a lapwing, and hides her in the honeysuckle arbor. With a strange fire in her ears she overhears how desperately in love with her is Benedick. The bird is limed; she swears to herself to requite his devotion. Hero's wedding-day is fixed: Claudio is the lucky man. But the villain Don John concocts a plot which has most painful results for twenty-four hours at least. He takes Claudio and his friend Don Pedro to the orchard, and shows them, as it seemed, Hero bidding John's follower Borachio a thousand good-nights: it is really her maid Margaret in her garments. Claudio in a rage allows her to go to church, but before the altar scornfully rejects her. Her father is in despair, Beatrice nobly indignant and incredulous. Hero swoons, and the officiating friar advises the giving out that she is dead from the shock. Claudio believes it, and hangs verses on her tomb. Meantime Dogberry's famous night-watch have overheard Borachio confess the villainous practice of John and himself. Then Hero's joyful friends plan a little surprise for Claudio. Leonato makes him promise, in reparation, to marry a cousin of Hero's, who turns out to be Hero herself come to life. A double wedding follows, for Benedick willingly suffers himself to be chaffed for eating his words and becoming "the married man. >>>> Yet both he and Beatrice vow they take each other only out of pity. AS YOU LIKE IT. In this happiest of his middle-period comedies, Shakespeare is at no pains to avoid a tinge of the fantastical and ideal. Its realism lies in its gay riant feeling, the fresh woodland sentiment, the exhilaration of spirits that attend the escape from the artificialities of urban society. For one reason or another all the characters get exiled, and all meet in the Forest of Arden, where "as you like it" is the order of the day. There is the manly young Orlando, his villainous elder brother Oliver, and their servant Adam. At court is the reigning duke, his daughter Celia, her cousin Rosalind, and Touchstone the clown. In the forest, the banished elder duke (father of Rosalind) and the melancholy Jacques, and other lords who are blowzed with sun and wind a-chasing the dappled deer under the greenwood tree; the pealing bugle, the leaping arrow, the al fresco table loaded with the juicy roast of venison, and long idle summer hours of leisurely converse. On the outskirts of the forest are shepherd swains and lasses,-old Corin, Silvius (in love with Phebe), and the wench Audrey. Orlando has had to fly from his murderous brother. Rosalind has been banished the court by her uncle, and she and Celia disguised as shepherd men have slipped away with Touchstone. Now Rosalind has been deeply smitten with Orlando since she saw him overcome the duke's wrestler, and he is equally in love with her. We may imagine her as "a nut-brown maid, tall, strong, rustically clad in rough forest garments," and possessing a perennial flow of cheerful spirits, a humor of the freshest and kindliest. Touchstone is a fellow of twinkling eye and dry and caustic wit, his face as solemn as a church-yard while his hearers are all agrin. He and Jacques look at life with a cynical squint. Jacques is a blasé libertine, who is pleased when things run counter and athwart with people, but is after all not so bad as he feigns to be. Like a series of dissolving views, scene after scene is glimpsed through the forest glades, here the forester lords singing, and bearing the antlers of the stag: there love-sick Orlando carving verses on the bark of trees, or rescuing his brother from the lion. The youth Ganymede (really Rosalind) pretends she can cure Orlando of his love-sickness by teaching him to woo him as if he were Rosalind, all of which makes a pretty pastoral picture. Anon Touchstone passes by, leading by the hand the captive of his spear, Audrey, who has never heard of poetry; or in another part of the woodland he is busy mystifying and guying the shepherd Corin. Ganymede gets the heartless coquette Phebe to promise that if she ever refuses to wed him (with whom she is smitten) she will wed her scorned and despairing admirer Silvius, and makes her father promise to give Rosalind to Orlando; then retires and comes back in her own garments as Rosalind. The play ends with a fourfold marriage and a dance under the trees. TWELFTH NIGHT, OR WHAT YOU WILL, is a delightfully humorous comedy. An item in the manuscript diary of John Manningham shows that it was played February 2d, 1601, in the fine old hall of the Middle Temple, London, a hall still in existence. The twelfth night after Christmas was anciently given up to sport and games; hence the name. fresh, gay feeling of a whistling plowboy in June was the mood of the writer of Twelfth Night. Tipsy Sir Toby's humor is catching; his brain is like a bottle of champagne; his heels are as The 392 light as his head, and one feels he could cut a pigeon-wing with capering Sir Andrew "to make all split, » or sing a song "to make the welkin dance.» The scene is a seaport city of Illyria, where a sentimental young duke is fallen into a love-melancholy over the pitiless lady Olivia. Now the fair Viola and her brother Sebastian,—strikingly alike in feature, unknown to each other reach the same city, Sebastian in company with his friend Captain Antonio. Viola enters the service of the duke as a page, in garments such as her brother wore. With the rich Olivia dwell her Puritanical steward Malvolio, her kinsman Sir Toby Belch, and her maid Maria, and other servants. Olivia has a suitor, and Sir Toby an echo, in the lean-witted Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Malvolio is unpopular: he thinks because he is virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale; but Maria lays a trap for his vanity, which is fathoms deep. She drops a mysterious letter in Malvolio's path, penned in Olivia's hand ("her very C's, her U's, and her T's"). The letter begins with "MO AI doth sway my life," bids him be opposite with a kinsman and surly with servants, recall who commended his yellow stockings and wished to see him cross-gartered, and remember that some have greatness thrust upon them. He swallows the bait, and makes himself such a ridiculous ass that Olivia thinks him out of his wits, and Sir Toby has him bound and put into a dark room. Malvolio has called the clown "a barren rascal,» and this keen-witted lovable fellow now has a delicious bit of retaliation. Assuming the voice of the curate Sir Topas, he assures him that until he can hold the opinion of Pythagoras that the soul of his grandam might haply inhabit a bird, he shall not advise his release. Then resuming his own voice he indulges in more excellent fooling. When last seen Malvolio is free, and bolting out of the room swears he will be "revenged on the whole pack» of them. To return: Viola (as "Cesario») becomes the duke's messenger to WOO Olivia by proxy. Olivia falls desperately in love with the messenger; and when Aguecheek spies her showing him favors, he is egged on by roguish Sir Toby to write him a challenge. But Cesario is afraid of the very sight of naked steel, and Sir Andrew is an arrant coward. Sir Toby, after frightening each nearly out of his wits with stories of the other's ferocity, at length gets them for form's sake to draw their swords; when in comes Captain Antonio, and mistaking Cesario for Sebastian, takes his part. In the mean time, Olivia has married Sebastian by mistake for Cesario, and the two knights both get their heads broken through a similar misunderstanding; for however it may be with Cesario, Sebastian is "a very devil incardinate» with his sword. Presently Sebastian and Cesario meet, and the mystery is solved: Viola avows her sex, and marries the duke, whom she ardently loves. JULIUS CESAR.-The material for this stately drama, the noblest of Shakespeare's historical plays, was taken from Plutarch. The action covers nearly two years, 44 to 42 B. C. The dramatic treatment, and all the splendid portraiture and ornamentation, cluster around two points or nodes,-the passing of Cæsar to the Capitol and his assassination there, and the battle of Philippi. Of the three chief conspirators,- Brutus, Cassius, and Casca,- Brutus had the purest motives: "all the conspirators, save only he, did that they did in envy of great Cæsar"; but Brutus, while loving him, slew him for his ambition and to serve his country. His very virtues wrought Brutus's ruin: he was too generous and unsuspecting. The lean-faced Cassius gave him good practical advice: -first, to take off Antony too; and second, not to allow him to make an oration over Cæsar's body. Brutus overruled him: he spoke to the fickle populace first, and told them that Antony spoke only by permission of the patriots. The eloquent and subtle Antony seized the advantage of the last word, and swayed all hearts to his will. There lay the body of the world-conqueror and winner of hearts, now a mere piece of bleeding earth, with none so poor to do him reverence. Antony had but to hold up the toga with its dagger-rents and show the pitiful spectacle of the hacked body, and read the will of Cæsar,-giving each citizen a neat sum of money, and to all a beautiful park for their recreations,to excite them to a frenzy of rage against the patriots. These fly from Rome, and, drawing their forces to a head at Philippi, are beaten by Octavius Cæsar and Antony. Both Brutus and Cassius fall upon their swords. The great "show" passages of the play are the speech of the tribune Marullus ("O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome"); the speeches of Antony by Pompey's statue ("O mighty Cæsar! dost thou lie so low?»-«Here wast thou bayed, brave hart."-"Over thy wounds now do I prophesy"); and of Brutus and Antony in the rostrum ("Not that I loved Cæsar less, but that I loved Rome more"; and "I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him"),- these, together with the quarrel and reconciliation of Bruts and Cassius in the tent at Philippi. Certain episodes, too, are deservedly famous: such as the description by blunt-speaking, superstitious Casca of the night-storm of thunder and lightning and rain (the ghosts, the surlyglaring lion, and other portents); the dispute at Brutus's house about the points of the compass ("Yon grey lines that fret the clouds are messengers of day"); the scenes in which that type of loyal wifeliness, Portia, appears (the wound she gave herself to prove her fortitude, and her sad death by swallowing fire); and finally the pretty scene in the last act, of the little page falling asleep over his musical instrument, in the tent in the dead silence of the small hours of morning, when by the waning taper as he read, Brutus saw the ghost of murdered Cæsar glide before him, a premonition of his death on the morrow at Philippi. HAMLET is Shakespeare's longest and most famous play. It draws when acted as full a house to-day as it ever did. It is the drama of the intellect, of the soul, of man, of domestic tragedy. Five quarto editions appeared during the poet's life, the first in 1603. The story, Shakespeare got from an old black-letter quarto, The Historie of Hamblet,' translated from the French of Belleforest, who in turn translated it from the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus. Some time in winter («'tis bitter cold »), the scene opens on a terrace in front of the castle of Kronberg in Elsinore, Denmark. The ghost of his father appears to Hamlet,- moody and depressed over his mother's marriage with Claudius, her brother-in-law. Hamlet learns from his father the fatal secret of his death at the hands of Claudius. He devises the court-play as a trap in which to catch his uncle's conscience; breaks his engagement with Ophelia; kills the wary old counselor Polonius; and is sent off to England under the escort of the treacherous courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to be put to death. On the way he rises in the night, unseals their murderous commission, rewrites it, and seals it with his father's ring, having worded it so that they themselves shall be the victims when they reach England. In a fight with pirates Hamlet boards their ship, and is conveyed by them back to Denmark, where he tells his adventures to his faithful friend Horatio. At Ophelia's grave he encounters Laertes, her brother; and presently, in a fencing bout with him, is killed by Laertes's poisoned sword, but not before he has stabbed his treacherous uncle and forced the fatal cup of poison down his throat. His mother Gertrude has just died from accidentally drinking the same poison, prepared by the King for Hamlet. The old threadbare question, "Was Hamlet insane?» is hardly an open question nowadays. The verdict is that he was not. The strain upon his nerves of discovering his father's murderer, yet in such a manner that he could not prove it ( e., by the agency of a ghost), was so great that he verges on insanity, and this suggests to him the feigning of it. But if you deprive him wholly of reason, you destroy our interest in the play. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA is one of the later products of Shakespeare's pen. Whether he got his facts from Chaucer, or from medieval tales about Troy, is uncertain. The drama is his wisest play, and yet the least pleasing as a whole, owing to the free talk of the detestable Pandarus and the licentiousness of the false Cressid. Some have thought the piece to be an ironical and satirical burlesque of Homer. There is very little plot. The young Trojan, Troilus, in love with Cressida, is brave as a lion in battle and green as a goose in knowledge of women. (But "to be wise and love exceeds man's might.") His amour, furthered by Cressida's uncle, Pandarus, is scarcely begun when Cressida is exchanged for a Trojan prisoner and led off by Diomed to the Greek camp. arriving, she allows herself to be kissed by the Greek generals, whom she sees for the first time; as Ulysses says, "There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip." She has just vowed eternal On 394 loyalty to Troilus too. But she is anybody's Cressid; and with anguish unspeakable, Troilus later overhears her making an appointment with Diomed, and sees her give him his own remembrance pledge. By gross flattery of the beef-witted Ajax, the wily Greek leaders get him to fight Hector. But Hector and he are related by blood, and after some sparring and hewing they shake hands. Hector is then feasted in the Grecian tents. The big conceited bully Achilles, "having his ear full of his airy fame," has grown ❝dainty of his worth »; and finding his reputation "shrewdly gored" by his long inactivity, and by the praise Ajax is getting, and especially spurred on by the death of Patroclus, at length comes into the field, but plays the contemptible coward's part by surprising Hector with his armor off and having his Myrmidons butcher him. Thersites is a scurvy, foul-mouthed fellow, who does nothing but rail, exhausting the language of vile epithets, and hitting off very shrewdly the weak points of his betters, who give him frequent fist-beatings for his pains. The great speeches of Ulysses, Agamemnon, and Nestor all breathe the selfsame tone of profound sagacity and insight into human nature. They have the mint-stamp of but one soul, and that Shakespeare's. Homer's sketches of the Greek leaders are the merest Flaxman outlines; but Shakespeare throws the Röntgen rays of his powerful analysis quite through their souls, endowing them with the subtlest thoughts, and through their masks utters such sentences as these: "The ample proposition that hope makes In all designs begun on earth below, Fails in the promised largeness." • One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, That all with one consent praise new-born gauds." "Keep then the path; For emulation hath a thousand sons There are no other scenes in Shakespeare so packed with sound and seasoned wisdom as the third of Act i. and the third of Act iii. in Troilus and Cressida. OTHELLO, THE MOOR OF VENICE, ranks with Hamlet,' Lear,' and 'Macbeth,' as one of Shakespeare's four great mas terpieces of tragedy. The bare outline of the story came to him from Cinthio's 'Il Moro di Venezia.' It is the story of "one who loved not wisely, but too well; of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, perplexed in the extreme.X Othello has a rich exotic nature, a heroic tenderness, quick sense of honor, childlike trust, yet fiercest passion when wronged in his soul. In Iago we have a werewolf's face behind a mask of stoutest honesty; he is one to whom goodness is sheer silliness and cruel craft a fine prudence. The Moor has wedded Desdemona, and from Venice sailed to Cyprus, followed by Roderigo, who is in love with her and is a tool of Iago. Iago hates Othello for appointing Cassio his lieutenant, leaving him to be his humble standard-bearer. He also suspects him of having cuckolded him, and for mere suspicion in that kind will diet his revenge by trying to pay him off wife for wife, or failing that, to poison his happiness forever by jealousy. And he wants Cassio's place. He persuades Roderigo that Cassio and Desdemona are in love, and that if he is to prosper, Cassio must be degraded from office or killed. The loyal Cassio has a poor brain for drink, Iago gets him tipsy and involved in a fray, and then has the garrison alarmed by the bell. Othello dismisses Cassio from office. The poor man, smitten with deep shame and despair, is advised by "honest » Iago to seek the mediation of the divine Desdemona, and out of this he will work his ruin; for he craftily instills into the mind of Othello that his wife intercedes for Cassio as for a paramour, and brings him where he sees Cassio making his suit to her, but retiring when he perceives Othello in the distance. "Ha! I like not that," says Iago. And then, forced to disclose his thought, he reminds the Moor that Desdemona deceived her father by her secret marriage, and may deceive him; also tells a diabolically false tale of his sleeping with Cassio, and how he talked in his sleep about his amour with Desdemona. Othello had given his wife a talismanic embroidered handkerchief, sewed by a sibyl in her prophetic fury. Iago had often urged his wife Emilia to steal this "napkin," and when he gets it he drops it in Cassio's chamber. The Moor sees it in his lieutenant's hands, and further sees him laughing and gesturing about Bianca, a common strumpet, and |